Letter to the Editor: Centralia ER Nurses Perform Superhuman Work on a Daily Basis

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Let me start by saying that I am not a nurse, but I do work at the hospital here in Centralia, and I would like to pay a tribute to the nurses that work in our emergency room.

They are often required to work for days on end without breaks or lunches and almost always without a full complement of staff. There are only 22 rooms in this ER, yet typically there are 40 to 60 patients here waiting to be seen.

They must deal with a tidal wave of patients streaming in from the four or five ambulances in the bay and a continuous line of foot traffic entering through the front doors. Many of these patients will be here for 10 to 15 hours because patients are not seen on a first come basis but rather on their level of patient illness or injury. Some must wait for a hospital bed upstairs or transfer to a long-term nursing care or mental health facility. They could remain in the emergency room for many days.

As you may imagine this does not encourage the poor, sick and injured who come here for help to be in a very gracious mood. Our much-beleaguered nursing staff must absorb the brunt of the frustrated public who cannot understand why they must wait for such intolerable amounts of time, many of whom are incredibly ill or in agonizing pain, often from a serious injury.

What the public simply does not realize is that our nurses are digging down deep for a superhuman effort to care for as many of the patients who come here as they possibly can, with no rest, insufficient help and even sometimes with shortages of supplies (as the whole nation is experiencing a broken supply chain).



They do an amazing job of keeping a smile on their faces despite everything and we should be so grateful that they come back day after day, no matter how brutal it gets and perform their jobs with compassion and with no hope of gratitude.

So, I would like to say, thank you!

 

Diana Jennings

Chehalis